We’re doing what? That was the response from some members when they heard that the church was having a “good old-fashioned” tent meeting on June 22. The tent would be erected on the front lawn of the church. Pastor Alex Horton wanted to have a church service outside the walls of the church building to be more visible to those in the community. The original plan was to have the tent meeting in May, but it was rained out. Another date was set for June 22. When the date arrived, the excitement waned a bit because it was going to be sunny, 94 degrees with high humidity.
Some of the members made considerable declarations that they were not going to sit under a hot tent. It had been over thirty years since Longview had a tent meeting. Even though this would only be for one service, that was still enough for some people not to come.
I remember it well. It was unsettling as I walked down the dimly lit hall to the area that we were told to go to. We had already been processed and now it was time to go further into the jail. The reality of the situation began to sink in as we walked past the cells with inmates who stared curiously at this new group coming in. The chatter, taunts and even the smell of the place made me feel uneasy. As I looked at the small cells with the steel toilets and sinks, I remember thinking that this was not the place I wanted to be. These thoughts were interrupted when it happened. There was a big clank of the steel gate closing behind me and I realized that I was officially locked in jail. Fortunately, I wasn’t an inmate there. I was with the Longview Prison Ministry team who was there to conduct a church service with the inmates at the Shelby County Penal Farm, the name at the time.
The Longview Prison Ministry has a long and storied history that started in the early seventies. Our sister church, First S.D.A. Church, had started a prison ministry and was having Bible studies at the jail before Longview became involved. Dr. Isaac Fordjour, Bro Fred Pullins and Bro. Herbert Brown Sr. decided to join in with the service there on Saturday evenings. At the time, most of the inmates who came to the Bible study were white men. That soon changed when the men of Longview arrived. The black inmates who had not been attending started to come and soon they were the majority of the people who came. The leaders of the First S.D.A. Church Prison ministry team wisely decided to let the Longview team take over because the inmates could relate better to them and reaching them could be more effective. They didn’t mind relinquishing the leadership role as long as the prisoners were being taught the word of God.
Since the Longview team was now in charge, they had to figure out how to give Bible studies and encourage the men to make a decision for Christ. Elder Robert Willis was the pastor of Longview at the time and supported the prison ministry. He would often go with the team and speak to the men. When Pastor Joseph Jones was assigned to Longview, he quickly became involved the Prison team. He would preach with enthusiasm and power to the inmates. The Spirit of the Lord convicted many hearts and numerous men made a decision to be baptized. The Longview prison team rejoiced at the thought of dozens of men making a choice to go all the way with the Lord. However, there was one glaring problem. How could it be done? There was no baptismal pool at the jail.
Pastor Jones and the Prison team didn’t know what to do but the Lord was in the plan and had already worked it out. Bro. Woosey, who had been a part of the First Church prison team, was still working with Longview’s team. He was also friends with the Shelby County Sheriff. He asked if the inmates who wanted to be baptized could be transported out to a place that had a pool. Of course, Pastor Jones and the prison team volunteered Longview to be the place. The sheriff agreed and plans were set in motion to make it happen. This was probably the first time that this had happened. There were other churches that had prison ministries there but no one else was baptizing.
Of course you know that the devil wasn’t going to let things go smoothly without a fight. When the plan was brought to the church, there was much discussion and plenty of questions. The team had to navigate through the Longview minefield of the “Ps”….Policy, Precedent, Prior Practices, Parliamentary Procedures, Pragmatic Process, Personal Preferences, Protocol and a host of other things were put in the way. When were they going to be there? How many were getting baptized? Who was responsible for their transport and safety? What about the wet clothes? Who was going to run the water? These question and more were all discussed at length. This was a new ministry to the church and some of the “saints” were not comfortable with these “jailbirds” being at church with the “good church folks”. What if one of the inmates tried to escape?
The pastor and the prison team was not about to let the opposition win the battle. The inmates were brought to the church and baptized on Sabbath afternoons when the “saints’ had left. Not many people even knew that this was happening. Many souls were baptized.
Now another problem arose. Because so many men wanted to be baptized, it was no longer practical or safe to transport that many men to Longview for baptism. The Prison Ministry Team asked the prison officials if a pool could be brought to the jail for baptism. The prison officials agreed and a 150 gallon black plastic pool was purchased and the baptisms started to happen again. The Lord continued to bless this ministry to reach souls who needed to hear the gospel and give their lives to Christ.
After a few years the ministry was expanded to go to two state institutions of corrections, Fort Pillow State Prison, now West Tennessee State Prison, and Lake County Regional Correctional Facility, now The Northwest Corrections Center. Fort Pillow was about an hour away from Memphis and the Lake County prison was about two hours away from Memphis. The prison ministry team went to each prison once a month. Many inmates were taught the word of God and committed their lives to the Lord. The Lord’s hand of provision and protection has been with the prison team since the beginning.
However, the path was not always smooth. There were times when the team faced significant danger. One of these times was when the prison team along with choir traveled to the Fort Pillow Prison along Highway 51 north on April 1, 1989. It had been raining most of the day when they traveled north along the highway across the Hatchie River. They went to the prison, had a wonderful church service, and returned home that night across the same bridge. Later that evening on the news, it was reported that the bridge had washed out and collapsed. Eight people lost their lives. God’s hand of protection had saved the lives of the prison team and the choir by letting them cross the bridge safely.
Many of the inmates were sincere about turning their lives around and doing better. It wasn’t just a “jailhouse religion” until they were released and returned to the streets to continue their previous life of crime. Several former prisoners joined Longview after their incarceration. A few of them even married some ladies in the church. Not only did they make a change in their lives but some of them even worked with the prison ministry team and returned to the prisons to help other inmates find a new life in Christ. One former inmate, James Young, went to Oakwood University, and became a pastor in the South Central Conference. Ollie B. McKinney was an inmate at the Fort Pillow prison. He was serving a long prison sentence and wasn’t expected to ever be released.
He started to attend the church services conducted by the Longview prison team, completed the Bible studies, and was baptized at the prison. God intervened in his situation and he was miraculously released. He became a faithful and beloved member of Longview until he passed away.
Another noted former inmate who completely changed his life is Jerry Wilson. Jerry’s story is unique. He decided to attend the church services in the Shelby County Penal Farm when the Longview prison team would visit. There was something special about the message that he received. He was learning truths from the Bible that he had never heard before. Elder Joseph Jones preached the Amazing Facts lessons with power and conviction. He also took time to answer questions that came up. Even the ladies that visited with the team had a different look about them. They were dressed modestly and carried themselves in a respectful way. Jerry continued to study the Bible for himself and never missed a meeting. When he had served most of his sentence, he was eligible for release. However, there was one problem. He had been taking a welding course while in jail and needed two more weeks to get his certificate. He went before the judge and asked if he could stay in jail for a couple of more weeks to complete the course and get his certificate. The judge was astonished and exclaimed that he had been on the bench for over twenty years and no one had ever asked to stay in jail a little longer. He granted the request and Jerry completed the course, got his welding certificate and was released.
For decades the Longview Heights S.D.A. Church has dedicated themselves to serving those behind bars. Their prison ministry team, a group of dedicated volunteers, ventured into the local and regional correctional facilities each week. It is the oldest ministry in the church that is still going today. Leading this special group of volunteers for over fifty years has been Elder Leo Tate. Elder Tate is over eighty years old but still has the passion and the energy to continue working with the prison ministry. The work has been difficult at times. They were often met with skepticism and hostility, but they pressed on, undeterred by the challenges they faced. Longview recently asked Elder Leroy Wilbourn to head the prison team. He, Elder Tate, and the rest of the team still continue to share the love of God in the prisons each week.
Longview Heights S.D.A. Church had long been known for its prison ministry, but their vision extended beyond the walls of correctional facilities. Elder Tate and Dr. Isaac Fordjour with the ministry team dreamed of creating a place where former inmates could transition back into society, find support, and avoid the pitfalls that had led them astray. They wanted to build a beacon of hope in a struggling neighborhood. In the heart of the city, they found their opportunity: an old, dilapidated former church in a poor neighborhood known for its high crime rate and poverty. The building was formerly a church but because of declining membership and deaths, the building was closed down. The building had been abandoned for years, a symbol of decay and neglect. But where others saw ruin, the Prison team saw potential.
After talking to Elder Leo Tate, this former church building was donated to the Longview prison ministry by Mrs. Emma Vasser, Mrs. Merle Cowan and Pastor Porter. LIA House was named by Dr. Isaac Fordjour. The name means Layman In Action.
This building is located in a community that has many needs. Money was donated by the Southern Union and others to renovate the building. The members of the Prison ministry team also worked on the building themselves to help with the renovation. Work was hard and funds were tight, but they pressed on with faith and determination. After much effort and sacrifice, LIA House was opened to the community. Finally, the LIA House stood proudly where the old building once decayed. It was a beautiful transformation, both inside and out.
The center offers a variety of services: job training programs, counseling, educational classes, and a food pantry. Food is given to the neighborhood twice a month. Elder Thomas Yates offers tutorial courses. Computer classes are given to people who need training. Bible studies are given each week to those in the neighborhood or anyone in the community who wants to study the Word of God. Bro. Taylor Phillips even has a garden on the grounds where fresh vegetables are grown and given to the community.
Officials in red states are increasingly using schools to test the wall between church and state.
Oklahoma joined Louisiana last week in insisting that biblical teachings have a place in the classroom, alarming civil liberties groups that say lawmakers are trying to evangelize students in taxpayer-funded schools.
“The goal of all of these strategies is to assert Christian favor and privilege in America and to fight democracy’s steady march towards equality for all. It’s very much a backlash to all the progress that our society has made in recent times towards LGBTQ equality, towards women’s equality, towards racial equality and Black and brown equality,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Multiple Republican states have instituted policies in recent years that bring Christianity closer to the classroom, including Texas and Florida, where schools are now allowed to employ chaplains to serve in mental health roles.
But Louisiana kicked things up a notch with a new law to require the Ten Commandments on posters in every public school classroom, along with three paragraphs about how the Judeo-Christian document influenced the nation’s founding.
“Look, when the Supreme Court meets, the doors of the Supreme Court on the backside have the Ten Commandments. Moses faces the U.S. Speaker of the House in the House chamber. He is the original giver of law,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) said. “Most of our laws in this country are founded on the Ten Commandments, what’s the big problem? And that’s the part I don’t understand.”
Multiple civil liberties groups have sued over the Louisiana law, arguing it violates the First Amendment.
“Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.
And then, in Oklahoma last week, State Superintendent Ryan Walters said the Bible and Ten Commandments must be incorporated into public school curricula.
His memo to schools came days after the courts struck down as unconstitutional the nation’s first religious charter school — which had been approved in Oklahoma.
“I think in our law, it’s been pretty clear for a while that there’s a line between using the Bible as part of a broader education about history and literature, which is OK, but distinguishing that from officially using the curriculum for religious formation, religious instruction and religious evangelization,” said Richard Garnett, director for the program on church, state and society at the University of Notre Dame Law School. “So if you’re going to have the Bible in the public schools, whether it’s Oklahoma or anywhere else, I think schools are going to have to be sensitive to the fact that this line exists, and they need to be careful not to cross it.”
Experts and advocates say there are multiple reasons the push to get more religion in schools has been getting more traction, but the biggest is the conservative Supreme Court, which has shown it is willing to overturn precedent and in 2022 allowed a public school coach to pray on a football field after a game.
“Emboldened Christian nationalists are competing with each other to get the best case before the Supreme Court,” Laser said.
But advocates for religion in schools have pointed to the tremendous historical impact of the Bible and its teachings on Western culture and government.
“The Bible has influenced human history for thousands of years. It played a significant role in the development of Western civilization — from literature and the arts to our laws and form of government. The Supreme Court has recognized that public schools can constitutionally use the Bible in the study of history, civilization and more. It is natural that Americans want to preserve this pillar of our society as part of the public square and ensure that students are equipped with the basic biblical literacy necessary to fully appreciate and understand our culture and history,” said Greg Chafuen, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom.
The focus on how Christianity has influenced the U.S. and its culture can be one way to get it into lesson plays, but laws such as the one in Louisiana pose a steeper climb, said Neal McCluskey, director for the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute.
“I think that where they would have, I would say, you know, better than 50/50 chance of succeeding is if you if they put it in the curriculum or curricula, and they say, ‘Look, we’re including religion because it is totally within the bounds of public schooling to study religion,’” he said, adding advocates could always say “it’s in here, not to make people into Christians, but because Christianity was a major part of American history.”
And while both sides are adamant the law is on their side, no one is discounting the possibility of a sweeping ruling vastly changing public education from the Supreme Court, which has issued multiple landscape-shifting decisions within the past week alone.
McCluskey points to the religious Catholic charter school that was struck down in Oklahoma as one of the more interesting cases coming up on the topic.
”Here’s the problem is you have these public schools that anybody can apply to and found except for religious people,” he said, pointing to examples such as a Montessori school that has specific teachings around an ideology that is nonreligious.
“You can have anything except religious schools. There’s good reasons for that because the Constitution says that the government can’t advance any particular religion, but it is discrimination against religion to say you can have anything that’s secular, but you can’t have a religious school,” he added. “And so, it will be interesting, if this is appealed to the federal courts and eventually reach the Supreme Court, how their rule, whether it is the discrimination against religion that will be most important or having government advancing religion that’s the biggest concern.”
Louisiana’s decision to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments is the latest fallout from a spate of controversial rulings from the rightwing supermajority of the US supreme court which has opened up a Pandora’s box that is fueling efforts to turn America into a theocratic state.
The new law , signed on Wednesday by the hard-right governor, Jeff Landry, puts Louisiana in the vanguard of a decades-long movement to obliterate the foundational US separation of church and state. It puts wind in the sails of those who want the US to be reinvented as an overtly Christian nation, and comes in the wake of two highly contentious opinions from the highest court.
Both rulings, delivered within six days of each other in 2022, were backed by the six ultra-conservative justices who now have a stranglehold on the country’s most powerful court. The supermajority is one of the main legacies of Donald Trump, who placed three of the justices on the bench.
Related: ACLU sues Louisiana over requiring the display of Ten Commandments in public schools
The 2022 decisions chipped away at the bedrock principle that has guided the US since its inception. Enshrined in the first amendment of the US constitution, it stipulates that all faiths should be free to worship, yet none enjoy priority status as an established state religion.
“There’s no question that Christian nationalists are capitalizing on the recent supreme court cases. They are hopeful that the court is beyond repair and will undo years of precedent about religion in public schools,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation which is part of a coalition of groups challenging the new Louisiana law in the courts.
The first of the supreme court’s radical rulings, Carson v Makin , was delivered on 21 June 2022. In it, the conservative justices required the state of Maine to fund religious instruction in rural areas lacking a public high school – a command that flew in the face of the specific edict of James Madison, the main author of the first amendment, against taxpayers funding religious activity including education.
In a dissenting opinion, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor bluntly accused her rightwing peers of dismantling “the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build”.
The second ruling, issued less than a week later on 27 June 2022, landed an even greater punch on the settled law relating to church-state relations. The decision, Kennedy v Bremerton , in effect overturned more than 40 years of supreme court precedent – it was as audacious and extreme a measure in the field of religion as the Dobbs ruling , which overturned Roe v Wade in that of abortion.
The Kennedy case concerned a football coach, Joe Kennedy, who had been placed on administrative leave by his public school outside Seattle after he repeatedly ignored instructions and held prayer sessions with student players after games on the 50-yard line. Kennedy falsely claimed the prayers were “personal” and “private”, when in fact he had a long track record of leading student athletes in prayer stretching back years.
The supreme court opinion, in siding with Kennedy , scrapped what has become known as the Lemon test, which since its elucidation in 1971 has clarified for judges how they should view whether government actions touching upon religion are constitutional. The test said that the courts had to consider whether such action had a “secular legislative purpose” – it should neither advance nor inhibit religion, and must avoid fostering “an excessive government entanglement with religion”.
The Kennedy ruling, written by one of Trump’s appointees, Neil Gorsuch, threw out that tried and tested formula and replaced it with a far more vague prescription based on “history of tradition”. Such woolly definitions are proving popular among the all-powerful rightwingers – they applied exactly the same recipe to the regulation of guns in their 2021 Bruen ruling , with similarly explosive results.
Sotomayor’s response to Kennedy v Bremerton was even more visceral than her previous outburst. She wrote a 35-page dissenting opinion that was longer than Gorsuch’s majority ruling.
It was certainly more angry. Sotomayor said the decision put the constitutional right to the free exercise of faith ahead of the establishment clause which prohibits government from forming an established religion. She pointed out that legal precedent demanded that those two potentially conflicting precepts should be ranked equally.
“This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state,” the justice wrote. Then she gave a chilling prediction: “In doing so, the court sets us further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion, with all of our rights hanging in the balance.”
Louisiana’s governor must have been paying attention. By signing the new Ten Commandments law he has fulfilled Sotomayor’s warning. He is taking the US down a perilous path that is all but certain to lead to the supreme court. The same supreme court that opened this Pandora’s box, and that shows no desire to close it.
Stress is valuable to human growth and development, for without stress, growth would not occur in the world. It only becomes destructive when its intensity or duration exceeds the person’s capacity to react properly. According to an article from News Medical Life Sciences, stress can induce symptoms of anxiety or irritability and impede successful results. Prolonged periods of stress can result in mental fatigue and exhaustion and can prompt physical symptoms of distress as the endocrine system responds. These physical symptoms can manifest as disruptions to the immune system and will pose a significant health risk. Stressors in life cause emotions like fear, anxiety, tension, anger, and depression which can result in physical changes like increased heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, and many more.
Dealing with stress can be difficult without seeking the One who can give the solution to all problems. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thy own understanding- It shall be health to thy navel and marrow to thy bones.” Proverbs 3:6, 8. God is mighty, He knows the beginning to the end, and His presence is everywhere. God wants to help as well. “But without faith, it is impossible to please Him, for he that cometh to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” Hebrews 11:6. Who else can be reliably trusted more than He? It is vital to believe that He loves and that He wants to help. Therefore, it is essential to trust Him, to claim His promises and seek Him in prayer.
Longview Heights Seventh-day Adventist Church
Email: theview685@gmail.com
Website: https://longviewheightstn.adventistchurch.org/
Location: 685 East Mallory Avenue, Memphis, TN, USA
Phone: 901-774-5431